With partners:
Teacher Snapshot 1
The following reflection from a teacher in Victoria’s northern suburbs highlights the importance of taking into account parent’s expectations of their students and how these expectations may differ according to the gender of the child.TEACHER: Sometimes they’re harder on the girls. It depends on where they’ve come from and what their dreams are for their daughters. Sometimes they’ll push the girls to try hard and to go further, that they can be educated and married. If they’re educated and married, they’re a good catch aren’t they? …and it is marriageability. They are very romantic about the idea of getting married and many of our Year 12 girls were married. Some of them were even pregnant through the course of their Year 12 studies.
Teacher Snapshot 2
What does ‘at risk’ mean? Teacher and school values and aspirations for students may differ markedly from those of parents.
TEACHER: We talked about the notion of “at risk” in educational terms, the risk of dropping out, not completing school and then the sorts of implications that that has in terms of employment, and economic opportunities. Whereas in the families’ terms the kids aren’t at risk in that they’ve still got the family, the social support, the culture, the network, the community that is there to support them.
TEACHER: If an Arabic girl is getting married at 16 and her family’s wish for her is that she marries well so that she has a good life, so that she has beautiful children, that may mean that she fulfils the family’s requirements regarding her future, but for us it might mean at the end of Year 10 that’s she’s leaving school and she’s “at risk”. But when we in our middle-class towers look down and say, “She’s leaving school, she’s ‘at risk’, how are we going to save this child?” the kid doesn’t want to be saved. Her family doesn’t want her to be saved. She’s fine.
Teacher Snapshot 3
Some teachers find that boys from Arabic-speaking background families have culturally determined roles in relation to their sisters and other girls within the same community.
TEACHER: It’s really interesting. A lot of girls who wear the hijab will get treated differently by the Arabic boys… One of the boys told me when I asked him about it said “yes Miss they deserve more respect because they’re showing respect to our culture and religion”. But by the same token we had one boy, they were brother and sister, who went ballistic at his sister when she wore a school jumper. She’s one of the girls who wears a long skirt and hijab and a very loose top. Her father had brought her but we had to get him back. She’s about 55kgs, 5ft 2in in this huge jumper, totally shapeless. But the brother leapt across a table to get at her. We had to get the father back up to the school, because the boy felt responsible for his sister at school, he felt that she was dressing inappropriately, and so we had to get dad up to say it was ok for her to wear a school jumper. And we had similar issues with the boys over what some of the girls buy from the canteen to eat [halal or not].